Female Beastman Shaman

Beastwoman Shawoman?

This is one of the stranger figures I've ever painted. It's the female beastman shaman from CMON which fg passed to me. Its pose is a little odd, but then I don't think there are many female beastmen on the market...

I've given it the same treatment as my other beastmen, using red as the main colour with silver and bronze for the metallics and green for the accents. I've in fact decided to paint the whirl of what must be magical energy in her left hand green.

Her staff is quite a nice thing, featuring moaning skulls which I suppose could have been painted as some sort of a magical emanation instead of wood.

We haven't actually used magic in our Strandhogg games so far, but since my human and dwarven forces both have female representations, it's nice to have one for my beastmen too. Now if only I could find a suitable female goblin figure...

Sorcery!

My copy of the Sorcery! campaign module arrived in the mail today.

It is probably fair to say that I waited for years for this, after Myriador failed to deliver the fourth instalment of the series. Feels good to have the product in my hands now.

Inside the covers the text and illustrations are familiar...

But therein lies the problem - not all of the encounters and puzzles from a solo gamebook lend themselves well to being converted to an RPG format, where the options available to the players are not limited to two or three offered by the author. The way some spell components, artifacts and clues and hints are deposited for the players to pick up and use also seem fortuitous.

While I appreciate that the authors have kept the stories true to the original, almost thirty years have passed between when I first played the first book and today, and I have to say that both my prospective players and I may prefer a more... "realistic" setting and experience.

That is not to say that I won't use the module - I will just have to go through the whole series to make the storyline less linear, take out the more... childish elements (yes, I wasn't complaining about that thirty years ago now, was I ?), and maybe give the whole setting a darker, grittier atmosphere.

My head is killing me

Casualty figures add character to an army and the tabletop, and are a break from painting too many "line" figures.

Here's one of the casualty figures from the Perry WOTR metal pack, posing by a plastic wall corner which I think came from a 1:72 WW2 box.

The base is a 40mm square base I bought for use with my 15mm DBX armies - it's also the right size for four 20mm bases, which means it can be a unit filler.

The figure has a nice pose, but it's not really a high-quality sculpt or cast, or even the same scale as the Perry plastic figures (one shown here with GW Empire arms - I kinda wanted to show off the pose I created by trimming some plastic off the arm...).

Fine Advice

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I seem to have lost my momentum - I spent most of this afternoon watching a Family Guy marathon on cable TV while completing 3 WOTR figures; I guess the arrival of the GW Empire sword arms gave me the motivation to at least get something painted today.


Even with another lot of 88 castings expected to be delivered this month I found myself googling for a suitable figure for a Prince Nuada who would lead a Fey army of beastmen and other creatures against humanity...

As most wargamers I have the tendency to buy more than I can paint, and accumulate more figures and rules than I actually do play with, which is why I find this post on Henry Hyde's blog a useful reminder. Do have a read.

Perry WOTR infantry with GW arms

Even though I know I will probably never paint a big enough army to play WHFB, I have the crazy idea of buying and painting more Perry WOTR infantry and organisation them along the Empire codex.

Plus I need some armoured arms for my remaining figures.

Anyway, I bought some GW Warhammer bits which arrived in the mail today.

The armoured arms are too big and make the figures look like Hellboy. The unarmoured sword-arms are smaller, and more importantly the hands are of the appropriate size; a bit of trimming to get the angles, and this is what I ended up with:

The two figures on the left have GW arms, while the one on the right is the original for comparison. If you look closely you can still see that the arms are a little large - but once in a unit, especially with a shield over the left hand, that will probably pass unnoticed.

Have you herd the call of the wild?

I'm losing a bit of momentum, and frankly the Ungors are a bit harder to do than the Gors... but here they are anyway.

These are the heads and the bodies of the older edition Ungors (don't ask me which edition) with the arms of the current edition - the older ones came only with spears.

As you can see there are quite a few poses and variants of bows. The Ungors seem to have personalised their bows; even the arrows are not identical.

With them done, I can now field a force of two warbands for Strandhogg.

The Gors will be good fighters, but the lack of armour will probably cost the beastmen. I'm planning to get a minotaur for the force when the one I want gets released. In the meantime, I had better get the WOTR casualties done before my next delivery (of 64 figures!) arrives.

A wargamer in Istanbul and Iznik

It's been almost six months, but here are the photos I took on my trip to Istanbul last year.

Veterans of the Cyprus campaign in 1974. These men were on their way to their regimental reunion. 

Ishtar Gate, Istanbul Archaeological Museum.

Various Bronze Age/Age of Chariots artifacts.

 The Alexander Sarcophagus.

Remnants of the city walls at Iznik/Nicea.

 

Some guy I spotted running across the street with a chainsaw strapped to his back...Looks like they are preparing for the zombie apocalypse in Turkey too.

Display outside the Military Museum, telling the story of Seyid Cabuk.

Arrowheads

Yurt ornament. Perhaps someone might make some of these? Baueda?

Turkish sword and dagger

Detail view of chainmail

The manager at my hotel, who is doing a higher degree in Archaeology, suspects that this isn't the genuine article...

These polearms and helmets look like they were copied out of Perry's WOTR plastic infantry box set...

I asked a fellow visitor to pose beside this sword to give a sense of scale.

African throwing knives

Does anyone know which regiment this came from?

Needs more spikes and skullz...

Something for the Pulp gamer.

Turkey's first submarine, by those fellows from Spartan Games.

Guards at the back gate of Dolmabache Palace. Note the air-conditioned glass sentry-box o the left.

A model of Hayreddin Barbarossa's flagship at the Istanbul Naval Museum.

A soldier outside Topkapi Palace (I think it was).

Beastlord and Beastlore

I managed to finish painting the GW Beastlord which I bought second-hand off ebay last evening.

This figure is a bit iconic - there are two versions of it currently being sold by GW: one swinging a two-handed axe, and this one which is supposed to be holding two axes. The previous owner obviously tried to do a conversion and had cut the axe on his left hand off, which meant it was sold as "incomplete" and I managed to get it at a bargain; in fact, I have planned to field him with a shield, so I actually saved a bit of effort there!

It's a rather busy figure, with all the studs and bits he is carrying, but the colours responded to my usual block-and-wash technique once more.

What is interesting to me is that both versions of the figure come with one of its horns broken - I don't know if there is some fluff associated with that, but it did get me to think about fluff for my beastmen.

The GW beastmen (and their derivatives) come with so many skulls or other human body parts sculpted on them it makes me wonder: why do they hate us so much? "Chaos" is a convenient excuse, but I sort of wanted a... a nobler beastman.

Then I came across the Gundestrup cauldron and subsequently Pashupati while browsing, and I came up with a mythology for my beastmen.

In their creation myth, the beastmen tell of a time when all animals (including men and I suppose the other humanoid races) came to Pashupati to be given their traits.

The carnivores were first and asked for padded paws so they could stalk their prey, and claws and teeth to take them down.

The herbivores were next and they asked for hooved feet so they could run from their predators, and horns with which they may use to defend themselves.

Then man came before Pashupati and said: Lord, you have given the best traits to the carnivores and the herbivores - how shall we strive against them?

So Pashupati in his kindness gave man the greatest traits: feet to walk on, and hands which he may use to craft tools, on the condition that he used them only to keep himself safe.

But man exploited his advantage and enslaved and killed the other animals, so they came back to Pushapati, saying: Lord, with the hands you have given man he has made weapons to hunt us down and chains to enslave us. He has slain us not just for food or in defence, but also for sport. Our claws and horns are no match against his iron, and our paws and hooves do not outrun his arrows and spears.

When Pashupati heard this he was wroth, and he turned his supplicants into beastmen, giving them the hooves of the herbivores so he might run swiftly, the teeth and claws of the carnivores that he might be fearsome in combat, and the hands of man so he may craft and use weapons, and he sent the beastmen forth with the sacred mission of punishing man for breaking their covenant with Pushapati.

And that, my children, is why we beastmen make war on man.

Skull piles

I don't know what they are called officially, but that's what we call them here...

The dwarf-themed one on the left was rather easy to make. I took a 1" metal disc and glued my usual "spice mix" of sand and fine gravel to the top and side. When it dried I spray-primed it black, and when the primer dried I placed chopped up pieces of the dwarven barricade from GW's Skull Pass set, leaning the stone pillar against a piece of cork, and then half of a warhammer (a metal bit from some figure I must have cut off - can't remember which...) and the handle-half of a weapon cut from the plastic beastmen sprue. When everything dried, it was another coat of spray-primer and then a quick paint-job, followed by some tufts of flock.

These are rather cheap and quick to make, and offer a break between colours when painting by the production-line method. They don't take up much space to store, and can add some character to the tabletop. I think I'll be making more of these as I come across suitable bits.